I've been in law school for a while and I can't really define the word "justice." The other day, a judge asked me how I defined "justice." I muttered something about fairness and compliance with the law.

Can anyone provide a more learned and erudite definition of "justice?"

Philosophers have been debating and attempting to define the topic of justice for centuries and cannot come to a consensus on what constitutes "justice." Nobody on TLS will be able to give the type of comprehensive answer you are looking for.

I had a really good Civ Pro professor last semester who said the word justice and fairness are meaningless. If you want to talk about "justice" to a judge, it's much better to talk about something more concrete. Some examples: finality, autonomy, efficiency. Judges want something practical that they can actually recognize. They don't want abstract ideas from philosophy.

"What is justice" is the ostensible subject of Plato's Republic. Forgetting for a moment the deeper purposes of the work, justice turns out to be something like this: that each individual is bound to do the duty to which he is called as a part of the city. Aristotle makes a distinction here, and says that each individual deserves the right which he ought to enjoy in a society based on proportionate equality.

Eventually, Locke comes in with the idea that putting work into something makes it yours irrevocably. Justice, then, is that each has what he has made.

Give the nichomachean ethics' section on justice a read. Aristotle defines it in one place as complete virtue in relation to another. Complete virtue would then need defining, which is done in earlier sections of the book.

Rawls got it right. Aristotle got it horribly wrong. Proportional justice just rewards people who are born with the desirable natural endowments at the time. Maybe because old school philosophers thought god played a big role in who we are, but it's a crock of shit now.

"Our government, in the pursuit of its role in administering justice, should not favor those who win the natural lottery at the expense of those who do not. Instead, justice should require men to 'agree to share one another’s fate' because any result in the natural lottery 'could have been us.'"